How To Prepare Your E-Commerce Brand for BFCM

Considering the mad shopping rush that most E-Commerce brands experience during the holidays, it’s truly never too early to start preparing your customer service team for the Black Friday/Cyber Monday season. Despite the effects that inflation has had on the economy in recent months, consumers still spent $11.3 billion last year, a figure that is expected to increase during this year’s BFCM sales. Therefore, using the start of Q4 to review your processes and prepare your team is the best way to set your business up for a successful, profitable BFCM before the inevitable busyness of the holidays sneaks up on us all.
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Tips For Optimizing Your Customer Service Strategy Before BFCM

With an influx of changes in shopping trends brought on by the 2020 pandemic, greater reliance on mobile use, and emerging AI technologies, preparing for BFCM looks a lot different than it did even just 5 years ago. Right now, it’s more important than ever to make the necessary adjustments to your customer service strategy prior to this year’s Black Friday & Cyber Monday. Understaffed customer service teams and shoddy systems & processes are the root of why many E-Commerce businesses struggle to keep up with the demand of the early holiday shopping season. To ensure that your customers are ready to shout their loyalty for you from the rooftops after working with you this year, we’re sharing our tips for optimizing your customer service experience to solidify your brand reputation and create meaningful customer relationships.

1. Update Your Customer Services Processes & Policies

When the BFCM ticket spikes hit, your customer service team will be faced with the huge responsibility of managing several inquiries at once, often through different channels (hello, multitasking!). To offer them the best support possible, update your internal customer service processes and store the document in a place that your agents can access easily. Canned responses, next steps, and other notes about how to handle specific inquiries will save them time and give them more opportunities to: 1. Create a great experience for every customer, and 2. Serve more customers at a faster rate.While you’re updating your processes, be sure to also make your policies regarding shipping, returns, discounts, coupon codes, and other “FAQ-style” information easily available to customers. According to the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report, 69% of customers want to resolve as many issues as possible on their own using self customer service options. Therefore, presenting them with the opportunity to do so will save your agents time on repetitive inquiries that can be answered through self-service resources like policies and FAQ pages.

2. Incorporate Automation Where Possible

Speaking of self-service, let’s talk about how to combine these channels & resources with automation that saves time and energy for your agents. During the BFCM craze, it’s understandable that customers will have many questions about shipping, returns, and other important policies regarding their orders. To minimize the impact that repetitive inquiries have on your customer service team, implement automation and AI tools within your live chat to automatically suggest helpful articles based on what customers are typing in the chat window. (Gorgias, a powerful helpdesk software and one of our Partners, offers this exact tool, and we couldn’t love it more!)Here are a few other ways you can introduce automation and AI technology into your holiday customer service processes:

• Build a workflow that automatically follows up with customers who have abandoned their cart. Abandoned cart emails have a 41.18% open rate and are a gamechanger for recovering sales that may have otherwise been lost.
• Combine the power of AI with an automation to help match customers with the right agent based on their needs. No more bouncing customers from agent to agent to find someone with the right skills to handle their inquiry.
• Automate shipping emails that give customers the independence to track their order and view updates. Let’s be real – we all loooove to obsess over when our packages will arrive, so sharing updates with the customer directly will save your agents’ bandwidth from unnecessary inquiries.

3. Use Data To Gauge Ticket Volume

Customer service burnout is real, and the best way to prevent it from impacting your agents is to forecast your ticket volume.To do so, we recommend looking at the following data to estimate the amount of traffic your brand can expect to see during BFCM:

• Past order volumes from previous BFCM
• Business growth across the last year
• Marketing metrics from the last quarter and during the lead-up to BFCM

Review these figures carefully and then determine how many tickets your agents can reasonably complete during their shift. Considering the estimation from Gorgias that the average E-Commerce business will see a 20% increase in ticket spikes during BFCM 2023, you’ll want to keep this potential uptick in traffic in mind when thinking about how to staff your team during the holiday. At the end of the day, assigning more agents to cover BFCM tickets will be better than not having enough. Packed queues not only take a toll on your team, but the extensive wait times that happen as a result can negatively impact your CSAT scores.

4. Onboard Experienced Customer Service Agents

“Onboard new agents” doesn’t exactly sound like a simple task you can check off the ol’ to-do list, but when you partner with the right customer service outsourcing company, we can confidently say that it is an absolute breeze. After all, additional customer service agents who know your brand in and out can be the difference between a subpar customer service experience and an amazing one that keeps customers coming back again and again. The right partner for your business should:

• Have thorough training, hiring, and onboarding processes that quickly match you with the best agents for your brand
• Ask you questions about what you need from your customer service agents to ensure that they’re the right fit for your business
• Offer a transparent pricing model free of hidden fees
• Have a low turnover rate (happy customer service agents will be around for the long haul!)

Partner With TalentPop To Prioritize Customer Service During Upcoming BFCM Sales

The early holiday shopping season is typically a make-or-break time for E-Commerce brands, where businesses either flourish alongside the demand or fall flat under the pressure. At TalentPop, we’re no strangers to the complexity of BFCM and the challenges this busy time presents, which is why we offer a no-brainer customer service outsourcing solution to help your brand thrive. Each of our agents is trained in all the top E-Commerce tools and software, as well as equipped with soft skills like multitasking, empathy, and active listening that make them better able to work through difficult situations with customers. As the added cherry on top, we also offer a transparent pricing model (no hidden fees here!), month-to-month services that you can scale up or down based on need, and a dedicated Customer Success Manager to support you before, during, and after your agents’ onboarding. To learn more about how we can help you onboard agents in as little as 3 weeks to prepare for BFCM 2023, schedule a call with us today.